BACK WHERE SHE BELONGS
After 12 years away from the company, Marie-Laure Cérède has returned triumphantly to Cartier as creative director for timepieces
After completing business school, Marie-Laure Cérède landed a job at Cartier in 2002. She never imagined that 15 years later she would be nominated time-piecescreation director.
The appointment in May 2017 came seven months after her comeback at Cartier, following a 12-yearlong departure from the French maison to reap experience as Harry Winston’s artistic director.
“In the early stage of my career at Cartier, I met master watchmakers, craftsmen and jewellers, who shared their know-how with me. That made me even more passionate about horology,” said Cérède.
The brand’s rich watchmaking heritage allows her to revisit iconic timepieces and make them relevant to the 21st century. This year’s novelties include reinterpretations of Baignoire, Santos de Cartier and Panthère timepieces that she can spend the whole day talking about them.
“Our timeless watches date back over a century. Reinvention can stay true to the original while elevating them with today’s technology. Moreover, we look at how people wear our watches, and redesign them to facilitate gestures, and ensuring both comfort and functionality,” she said.
The squared Santos de Cartier was created in 1904 for Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont. Last year, the classic was updated with a sleeker proportion, a more comfortable ergonomic design and innovative interchangeable straps.
New versions include Santos de Cartier Skeleton Noctambule with its bridges coated in Super-LumiNova pigments, which radiate stored light at night, to recall how SantosDumont used floodlight for night flights.
“Cartier is not a conservative watchmaker, and you will see surprising elements in our creations,” she said. “Ingenuity is not only about engineering movements, and our technical innovations conjure these surprises.”
The watchmaking wizardry is demonstrated in Révélation d’une Panthère, which engages wearers in a hide-and-seek game. Composed of a multitude of gold beads, a panther’s head appears or disappears according to the wrist’s movement. It took five years to develop this playful effect, which has become even more magical by replacing the gold beads with diamonds in the 2019 version.
The emblematic panther first appeared as a motif on the brand’s wristwatch in 1914. Two years beforehand, Louis Cartier stretched a traditional round watch shape, and through closing two straight parallel lines with two curves, he fashioned the Baignoire (French for “bathtub”).
It became another style icon, whose aesthetics evolved to its familiar slightly curved oval shape in the late 1950s, with a dial featuring Roman or Arabic numerals and bordered by gold gadroons. In the 1960s, Cartier London modified the design as the oversized Baignoire Allongée that stylishly stretched along women’s wrists.
“In the past and until today, we have been exploring our watch shapes for new design expressions — for instance, the rework on the oval Baignoire. This year, we have also revived the Tonneau to further celebrate the different shapes of our watches,” she said.
The Tonneau is one of Cartier’s oldest watches, launched in 1906. The dial is on the cusp of a rectangle and an oval; the case curves slightly for a better fit on the wrist. Two brackets create an oblong, curved shape that follows the contours of the wrist.
Its comeback under the Cartier Privé collection woos watch connoisseurs through a redesigned hours and minutes model and an extra-large skeleton dual-timezone rendition.
While Cartier is not competing in high complications, the maison showcases its technical prowess in placing a dualtime-zone feature and making the whole run on one single movement, in a curved case.
The design makes the time easy to read on the skeleton bridges, and the second time zone is set by pressing on the crown at 4 o’clock and by one-hour jumps. The openwork of the movement brings lightness and nobility to a traditional complication, as a demonstration of how to perfectly balance form and function, case and movement.
“We emphasise the beauty of our timepieces, and do not reveal much about our technical watchmaking expertise, which is put entirely in the service of aesthetics, in the tonneau skeleton dual time zone model,” she said.
IN THE PAST AND UNTIL TODAY, WE HAVE BEEN EXPLORING OUR WATCH SHAPES FOR NEW DESIGN EXPRESSIONS